Your arguments would be applicable if the current global economy was in fact a "free trade" market. However in most places, it is far, far away from such a state.
The current outsourcing to China has less to do with free markets than it has to do with artifical barriers creating global imbalance over the last 60 years.
Hypocracy could have been a typo. On the other hand, if answers.com serves me correctly, hypo-cracy should stand for something liike..."government of the underhanded", so perhaps the inital poster was trying to coin a phrase.
This is correct. ScuttleMonkey takes a lot of night shifts (US Eastern time). Those happen to be the slowest period for submissions appearing in our bin. And that's when B-B submits stories. So at exactly the time we need submissions most, B-B is there. Kinda clever actually.
Not really.
Working under the assumption that submitters to slashdot are readers, and that, as you say submissions are slow during the night shift; it stands to reason that readership is also slow during the night shift.
As such, it is rather a waste to post stories in the middle of the night when no one is going to read them until next morning.
Whatever arguments are put forward for this farce, the facts are rather clear. Beatles has had 20 submissions in three months. By any standard, that's a lot. The extraordinarily high correlation with scuttlemonkey as the editor is very, very statistically significant.
Is Scuttlemonkey corrupt? Well, incompetance is the worst form of corruption. If Scuttlemonkey is sitting, spaced out from lack of sleep, on the nightshift, and is only half awake as he approves yet another **Beatles-Beatles submission, despite having been told countless times to be careful; then I would call that corruption. Your milage may vary, but this is at the very least, substandard.
It's clear that CmdrTaco has taken exception to the readership consistently pointing out what are clearly the symptoms of an underlying problem. I cannot remember a post of such length from him since his very public complaint after his name was changed in World Of Warcraft. His time would be more productively spent actually doing his job and dealing with this issue, and it is an issue, rather than posting such stories.
The integrity of Slashdot is at stake here. I'm not engaging in rhetoric. This really is all about integrity. The integrity of this site as a reliable source of news articles for its readers. In this regard, the suspect level of downmodding on otherwise quite relevent comments is further damaging to the sites integrity.
We, the Slashdot readership and commentators, ask for nothing more than professionalism and integrity from the Slashdot editorial team. It's not an unreasonable request.
The minute Digg gets a threaded comment system remotely as usable as this one, it's goodbye Slashdot.
I doubt it. The volitile nature of Digg means that truely insightful discussion may become lost amid the torrent of new stories filtering up through to the front page. I very much doubt threads on par with the bets slashdot discussions will ever bee seen on Digg.
That said, **Beatles Beatles is the definitive argument against the editor system.
I don't know, could be like modern-day RAM where you lose it the instant you lose power.
it's actually a lot like modern day RAM, exept the "power down" time is around 15 minutes after "clinical death". Information is not only contained in the configuration of the neurons, is is also contained in the current state of the electric charge between them. Thus, when the brain "powers down", quite a lot of information is lost.
The "article" fails to mention the single biggest reason why Mono was included. Fedora is a Gnome centric distro, and more and more Gnome applications are being written in Mono.
Miguel de Icaza has already been taken up on this. He basically said that the MS Sword of Damocles, didn't exist.
Whether it does or not, Gnome is getting Mono, and hence Fedora is too.
You can subclass istream and then cin = new istream_descendant provided nobody uses cin in their global constructors (do you know if they do?).
You can also provide a operator>> to a another class or type, and I'm fairly certain this is what you mean by overload- because at this point, cin>>foo can do something useful, but it affects other istreams elsewhere. That is also, often very desireable.
But, there's no way in C++ to actually replace cin with some subclass and make certain that every other class happens to see it that way.
OK. I'm not that concerned about terminology. I just write the stuff.
YES! The moderator is gone! Oh, wait you apparently don't know what a moderator is for. It is there to slow down the neutrons, so they can initiate another fission reaction if the neutrons are not slowed down the U-235 doesn't absorb them, resulting in a halting of the fission reaction.
Yes, the moderator has now stopped absorbing fast neutrons. This will in turn lead to a temperature rise in the reactor. Loss of moderator was a contributing factor to the Chernobyl explosion. Slowing down those neutrons keeps the reactor cool. If the graphite burns away, the sudden increase in temperature will fuel the fire.
Oh and if you read more of the wikipedia entry you would have noted the layer of inflammable silicon carbide in the pebble that is not flammable, and thus acts as a fire break. This same silcon carbide is subject to oxidisation erosion, and furthermore begins to seriously fail at temperatures above 1250 celcius. This layer is also subjected to mechanical wear and tear through normal pebble use. Creation of the pebbles is subject to industrial error and homogeneity cannot be guaranteed. Inhomegeneity There are over 250,000 pebbles per reactor.
So, basically the entire danger in the pebble bed reactor is a chemical fire. That's a big danger in itself. Smoke from the fire could spread highly radioactive material far and wide if it escaped.
Well no more radioactive material than any other fire. Materials in close proximity to radioactive substance, themselves become more radioactive. This effect is so significant that components from nuclear plants must be disposed of as radioactive waste. I imagine th esame would hold true of any chemicals inside a PBR.
There are problems with pebble bed reactors. They are not infallible systems.
All of the pebble bed reactors either in operation or planned are significantly smaller, on the order 100~200 MW of electric power and 200~400 MW of thermal energy (note the increase in efficiency)
Pebble bed reactors are designed to be modular. Source Reactor sites lack containment building for this exact reason. A fully equipped reactor would have to supply a comparable amount of electricity to be economically feasible, hence would need several pebble beds per facility. Extra beds alone increases risk.
So to make the blanket statement any fission reactor has the potential to create a catastrophe equal to the Chernobyl incident is to simultaneous ignore the design improvements in both safety & efficiency since the RBMK was designed, some 60 some odd years ago and to ignore the implementation details of existing and planned reactors.
Most likely, Chernobyl is not going to happen again. But a Chernobyl type accident is certainly on the cards if nuclear energy becomes popular. Safety and efficiency will only be as good as human fallability, and there is always room for error. Worst case scenario at a nuclear power plant is still orders of magnitude worse than worst case scenario at any other power generation station with the exception of a major dam. The west won't be the only place where these reactors might be built.
I've looked at the evidence. From what I've seen, pebble bed reactors are not some magic wand that can wave away the danger of a nuclear incident. It is fundamentally the same game, with more advanced technology. I believe that it is possible to use nuclear energy safely, but I am yet to be convinced of the competance of those responsible to do so, with the possible exception of those in France.
To cap it all off, there are questions on whether fission is really all that cost efficient by comparision to other methods, paticularly hydroelectric power.
I just don't think fission is ready for the big time.
IMO, if someone comes up and asks for documentation, they need to be fired! They obviously either 1) don't know how to read code and shouldn't be programming; 2) Don't understand the problem the code is trying to solve.
On the rare occassion that I look at code and can't figure it out, I rewrite it because, obviously, the code sucks.
No you cannot. std::cin is a global variable. You can overload >> in the class istream but that's not the same thing at all.
That's what's known as overloading streams, which is what cin is.
I have no idea what you mean by "decomposing" your programs.
Specifically, using object orientation and functional blocks to make everything simpler. i.e. not having a 40,000 line app in one file. C++'s big advantage is that I can do all this without using macros. C++'s big disadvantage is having to use pointers to do this, but C suffered from this as well.
The perception is that it's not as fast as C, and not as safe as Java. I wasn't going to touch on the latter because I'm of the experience that safe code has very little to do with language itself, but performace IS important.
It's not as safe as Java, and it's a little slower than C. Safe code has gallons to do with the language. C++ is paticularly suseptible to this, in a way I don't think C ever was. C++ gives you enough rope to hang yourself and all your customers, your dog, and Stroustrup, and still encircle the eart five times. However, just think what you could so with that much rope!
If the methodology of C++ is to perform operations that are costly in performance and size, then perhaps some attention needs to be given to reposturing C++, changing the methodology of C++, or moving on.
Near as I can tell, the methodology of C++ is to get as far away from assembly as possible while still maintaining acceptable performance. On this goal, I think it succeeds. However for most programmers, this goal sucks.
The point is you should always optimise your code within reason.
Rules of optimisation:
1. Don't 2. (Experts Only) Don't Yet!
Re:Balkanization
on
Demise of C++?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
In any event, the point is not that puts() is faster than cout but that Bjarne Stroustrup says that cout is how to write to standard output and that it's not slower or takes up more space than C-code.
OK. puts is faster. But I hate to break it to you, compared to cout, puts sucks.
puts is error prone in a way that cout is not. More appropriately, cin is far, far superior to get and all those derivatives. cin, cout and cerr, are slower, have more overheads, take more space,etc, etc. I still prefer them. Why? Because they're safer. Not totally safe, but leauges safer than the equivilent c functions.
On top of that you can overload cin. Some people do screw this up, but being able to write:
while(cin >> Big_Complicated_Object){//do stuff }
Is very sweet. C can only offer me this with hacks that will freeze thy young blodd etc, etc, etc.
I don't find C++ too bad. The compilers are OK, and I don't abuse the language features. I'm an OO kind of guy, and I like decomposing my programs. C++ lets me do this in a way C cannot.
Back to the original idea, though. Chucking it in the sea is only a good idea if it really gets mixed and thoroughly dispersed. But it can be done.
To be honest, this sounds like an even more stupid idea than the "chuck it into the magma" plan proposed earlier. Sediment does not just hang about on the bottom of the sea. It gets dispersed, consumed by animal and plant life, and generally finds its way back up to the surface somehow.
Dumping nuclear waste in a fluid of any kind seems ridiculous. By this argument, we should be able to burn nuclear waste in incinerators and disperse it into the air.
Drums, for all their problems, at least do not lead to instant dispersal.
Continuing to use extreme and ill-fitting examples isn't really helping your credibility.
Chernobyl isn't an ill fitting example. It's the perfect example of how scientific arrogance, combined with human fallability, leads to extreme screw ups.
I've read up on pebble bed reactors. It's a good system. But I'm not going to accept for one second that it's an infallable system. Because people made it, and people aren't perfect.
There's been a lot of good press for the nuclear industry lately, obviously fueled by the rising cost of oil. Consequently, you get guys like this AC, who were probably anti-nuclear until they actually read about pebble bed reactors, and are now rabidly pro nuclear, and basically runs around calling anyone who disagrees an ignorent luddite.
I've actually taken the time to read into this "new" technology, even though it's actually been around for ages. there are good systems out there, but to go around like this AC saying that a pebble bed reactor is completely flawless is obviously a fallacy.
I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that every nuclear accident that ever was, happenned not because of the design of the reactor, rather, it was down to human error. People screw up, it's a universal fact. Unfortunately, with something as dangerous as nuclear energy, screw up can, and have had, big consequences.
Those old soviet reactors can and did function safely. Some still do. The only real flaw in their design was its complete underestimation of the ability of man and machine, in unison, to completely screw up. Any system that makes that same underestimation, is doomed to fall to those same screw ups.
I can only hope to the gods that people like that AC are not involved in designing these new pebble bed reactors, or any other reactors types, including fusion, that may come after. People who believe in their own infallability usually make the biggest scew ups of all.
You didn't even read the very Wikipedia article that you linked to yourself did you? Search it for "Doppler broadening" and try, please please try, to wrap your mind around the concept that far, far smarter people than you have done the math on this.
OK I'll bite, due in large part to the fact that I read the entire article, including the critisisms section. I've also read other articles in wikipedia. Articles you clearly have not.
Let's take a look at the first critisism, which has clearly been edited by someone like yourself.
Several critics of pebble bed reactors have claimed that encasing the fuel in potentially flammable graphite poses a hazard. The reactor's use of an inert gas as a coolant nullifies this issue.
So we're all safe right? The gas is inert. It's cool right? Wrong. So potentially wrong.
Let's talk graphite shall we? Do you know what graphite is. Turns out, it's simply carbon. Here's a lesson from chemistry class. C + O2 -> C02. Turns out carbon burns in air. But does graphite? After all diamonds are carbon too.
As it turn out, yes graphite does burn in air. The substance is actually usually quite inflammable. However, one it starts to burn, it is almost impossible to extiinguish. This was the primary cause of the Windscale Fire, as it turns out.
So, let's imagine that air slips in as the reactor is too hot and the graphite moderator in the core ignited. Shit, meet fan.
Graphite burns. Shit, there goes the reaction moderator. Oops. What's that you say? The temperature is now over 1100 degrees centigrade. Darn! That's the melting point of uranium. Looks like the balls, already disinegrating, will now all flow into a big puddle at the bottom of the reactor. Reaching... critcal mass? Will there be an explosion now? I'm not nuclear physisist, but this all seems so potentially..... unsafe....
But this could never, ever happen to these new, expertly crafted pillars of human achievment known as pebble bed reactors right? Never ever, not even once over their 60+ years of service will a single atom of oxygen slip unnoticed past the level ten force fields surrounding the main chamber. The graphite in the balls will also never deteriorate under intense radioactivty levels. Never, couldn't happen. Nuh uh.
Now just accept that you were wrong and move on with your life.
Wow. You're right. How could I ever have been so foolish as to contemplate human and machine fallability. I should have much more blind faith. Like yourself.
*OMF rushes its mutant offspring away from what was previously a sweet and alluring fireside, panics throwing water over the blaze, in the process causing the fire to spit, which it turn ignites are carpet fire setting the entire house ablaze and killing all the occupants, except for one of the mutant offspring who developed a resistance to heat due to grotesquely thick skin*
Announcer: "In conclusion, using nuclear energy could have saved these innocent freaks of nature. It is clear that in order to save our country and the world, we must give massive tax incentives to the nuclear industry"
A guided drop would cause a penetration of about 100 feet or so into silt, then it goes down a few more feet each year (mostly due to sediment buildup).
This seems a little extreme, especially considering that enriched uranium waste becomes only as radioactive as natural uranium in only 100 years. Which is a fraction of the time it takes for material to sink into the mantle.
Touche. But car deaths directly kill over 40,000 people in the US every year, (Source) and the ancient city of Chernobyl, unlike cities beset with coal smoke, is still a writeoff.
It's not so bad when you consider that soil on average contains 1.8 parts per million of Uranium. Source.
Also of note here, is that with coal and soil, we are talking about natural Uranium, not enriched uranium used in plants, which can take 100 years to return to natural radioactivity levels.
Why don't you go read about Pebble Bed reactors and try to understand the basic principles before you get all hysterical about it?.... No, you don't, and that's exactlty the problem. You don't understand the technology so why do you think you can understand the failure modes?
I read about them. Coolant contamination appears to be the single biggest risk. If oxygen(air) leaks into the main chamber, the graphite moderator could ignite. I'm not sure how much the sudden ignition of graphite would upset the pristine interior of this paragon of engineering precision, but I imagine problems not strictly on the designers mind might occur.
A nuclear reactor is a living, breathing engineering entity. Things go right every day. Sometimes things go wrong. In short, if you belive a pebble bed reactor cannot meltdown, I have a bridge to sell you.
No, you don't. You are like the majority of people who think they know it all about nuclear. You don't know the worst case scenario, you just imagine you do. Go educate yourself, perhaps.
I think I'm fairly well educated on what the worst case scenario actually is.
...With their Hummer H2s!...And humidifiers!...And national reserves!...And McPackaging!...And the War in Iraq!...And with your danm TV shows! *shakes fist*
Slashdot Mirror
Your arguments would be applicable if the current global economy was in fact a "free trade" market. However in most places, it is far, far away from such a state.
The current outsourcing to China has less to do with free markets than it has to do with artifical barriers creating global imbalance over the last 60 years.
Hypocracy could have been a typo. On the other hand, if answers.com serves me correctly, hypo-cracy should stand for something liike..."government of the underhanded", so perhaps the inital poster was trying to coin a phrase.
This is correct. ScuttleMonkey takes a lot of night shifts (US Eastern time). Those happen to be the slowest period for submissions appearing in our bin. And that's when B-B submits stories. So at exactly the time we need submissions most, B-B is there. Kinda clever actually.
Not really.
Working under the assumption that submitters to slashdot are readers, and that, as you say submissions are slow during the night shift; it stands to reason that readership is also slow during the night shift.
As such, it is rather a waste to post stories in the middle of the night when no one is going to read them until next morning.
Whatever arguments are put forward for this farce, the facts are rather clear. Beatles has had 20 submissions in three months. By any standard, that's a lot. The extraordinarily high correlation with scuttlemonkey as the editor is very, very statistically significant.
Is Scuttlemonkey corrupt? Well, incompetance is the worst form of corruption. If Scuttlemonkey is sitting, spaced out from lack of sleep, on the nightshift, and is only half awake as he approves yet another **Beatles-Beatles submission, despite having been told countless times to be careful; then I would call that corruption. Your milage may vary, but this is at the very least, substandard.
It's clear that CmdrTaco has taken exception to the readership consistently pointing out what are clearly the symptoms of an underlying problem. I cannot remember a post of such length from him since his very public complaint after his name was changed in World Of Warcraft. His time would be more productively spent actually doing his job and dealing with this issue, and it is an issue, rather than posting such stories.
The integrity of Slashdot is at stake here. I'm not engaging in rhetoric. This really is all about integrity. The integrity of this site as a reliable source of news articles for its readers. In this regard, the suspect level of downmodding on otherwise quite relevent comments is further damaging to the sites integrity.
We, the Slashdot readership and commentators, ask for nothing more than professionalism and integrity from the Slashdot editorial team. It's not an unreasonable request.
The minute Digg gets a threaded comment system remotely as usable as this one, it's goodbye Slashdot.
I doubt it. The volitile nature of Digg means that truely insightful discussion may become lost amid the torrent of new stories filtering up through to the front page. I very much doubt threads on par with the bets slashdot discussions will ever bee seen on Digg.
That said, **Beatles Beatles is the definitive argument against the editor system.
I don't know, could be like modern-day RAM where you lose it the instant you lose power.
it's actually a lot like modern day RAM, exept the "power down" time is around 15 minutes after "clinical death". Information is not only contained in the configuration of the neurons, is is also contained in the current state of the electric charge between them. Thus, when the brain "powers down", quite a lot of information is lost.
The "article" fails to mention the single biggest reason why Mono was included. Fedora is a Gnome centric distro, and more and more Gnome applications are being written in Mono.
Miguel de Icaza has already been taken up on this. He basically said that the MS Sword of Damocles, didn't exist.
Whether it does or not, Gnome is getting Mono, and hence Fedora is too.
So, like you said, less than a week, if someone does it during their 20% time.
Odds are that this DRM is the product of a 20% project. And that alone makes it a cut above the regular herd. Expect cracking to be slow, and painful.
You can subclass istream and then cin = new istream_descendant provided nobody uses cin in their global constructors (do you know if they do?).
You can also provide a operator>> to a another class or type, and I'm fairly certain this is what you mean by overload- because at this point, cin>>foo can do something useful, but it affects other istreams elsewhere. That is also, often very desireable.
But, there's no way in C++ to actually replace cin with some subclass and make certain that every other class happens to see it that way.
OK. I'm not that concerned about terminology. I just write the stuff.
YES! The moderator is gone! Oh, wait you apparently don't know what a moderator is for. It is there to slow down the neutrons, so they can initiate another fission reaction if the neutrons are not slowed down the U-235 doesn't absorb them, resulting in a halting of the fission reaction.
Yes, the moderator has now stopped absorbing fast neutrons. This will in turn lead to a temperature rise in the reactor. Loss of moderator was a contributing factor to the Chernobyl explosion. Slowing down those neutrons keeps the reactor cool. If the graphite burns away, the sudden increase in temperature will fuel the fire.
Oh and if you read more of the wikipedia entry you would have noted the layer of inflammable silicon carbide in the pebble that is not flammable, and thus acts as a fire break.
This same silcon carbide is subject to oxidisation erosion, and furthermore begins to seriously fail at temperatures above 1250 celcius. This layer is also subjected to mechanical wear and tear through normal pebble use. Creation of the pebbles is subject to industrial error and homogeneity cannot be guaranteed. Inhomegeneity There are over 250,000 pebbles per reactor.
So, basically the entire danger in the pebble bed reactor is a chemical fire.
That's a big danger in itself. Smoke from the fire could spread highly radioactive material far and wide if it escaped.
Well no more radioactive material than any other fire.
Materials in close proximity to radioactive substance, themselves become more radioactive. This effect is so significant that components from nuclear plants must be disposed of as radioactive waste. I imagine th esame would hold true of any chemicals inside a PBR.
There are problems with pebble bed reactors. They are not infallible systems.
Truly Chernobyl is an extreme and ill-fitting example...
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.
The RBMK-1000 reactor specifically is known to have design flaws which creates safety issues.
The pebble bed reactor has known design flaws. These are valid issues.
All of the pebble bed reactors either in operation or planned are significantly smaller, on the order 100~200 MW of electric power and 200~400 MW of thermal energy (note the increase in efficiency)
Pebble bed reactors are designed to be modular. Source Reactor sites lack containment building for this exact reason. A fully equipped reactor would have to supply a comparable amount of electricity to be economically feasible, hence would need several pebble beds per facility. Extra beds alone increases risk.
So to make the blanket statement any fission reactor has the potential to create a catastrophe equal to the Chernobyl incident is to simultaneous ignore the design improvements in both safety & efficiency since the RBMK was designed, some 60 some odd years ago and to ignore the implementation details of existing and planned reactors.
Most likely, Chernobyl is not going to happen again. But a Chernobyl type accident is certainly on the cards if nuclear energy becomes popular. Safety and efficiency will only be as good as human fallability, and there is always room for error. Worst case scenario at a nuclear power plant is still orders of magnitude worse than worst case scenario at any other power generation station with the exception of a major dam. The west won't be the only place where these reactors might be built.
I've looked at the evidence. From what I've seen, pebble bed reactors are not some magic wand that can wave away the danger of a nuclear incident. It is fundamentally the same game, with more advanced technology. I believe that it is possible to use nuclear energy safely, but I am yet to be convinced of the competance of those responsible to do so, with the possible exception of those in France.
To cap it all off, there are questions on whether fission is really all that cost efficient by comparision to other methods, paticularly hydroelectric power.
I just don't think fission is ready for the big time.
IMO, if someone comes up and asks for documentation, they need to be fired! They obviously either 1) don't know how to read code and shouldn't be programming; 2) Don't understand the problem the code is trying to solve.
On the rare occassion that I look at code and can't figure it out, I rewrite it because, obviously, the code sucks.
Hack Mplayer. Then come back to me.
No you cannot. std::cin is a global variable. You can overload >> in the class istream but that's not the same thing at all.
That's what's known as overloading streams, which is what cin is.
I have no idea what you mean by "decomposing" your programs.
Specifically, using object orientation and functional blocks to make everything simpler. i.e. not having a 40,000 line app in one file. C++'s big advantage is that I can do all this without using macros. C++'s big disadvantage is having to use pointers to do this, but C suffered from this as well.
The perception is that it's not as fast as C, and not as safe as Java. I wasn't going to touch on the latter because I'm of the experience that safe code has very little to do with language itself, but performace IS important.
It's not as safe as Java, and it's a little slower than C. Safe code has gallons to do with the language. C++ is paticularly suseptible to this, in a way I don't think C ever was. C++ gives you enough rope to hang yourself and all your customers, your dog, and Stroustrup, and still encircle the eart five times. However, just think what you could so with that much rope!
If the methodology of C++ is to perform operations that are costly in performance and size, then perhaps some attention needs to be given to reposturing C++, changing the methodology of C++, or moving on.
Near as I can tell, the methodology of C++ is to get as far away from assembly as possible while still maintaining acceptable performance. On this goal, I think it succeeds. However for most programmers, this goal sucks.
The point is you should always optimise your code within reason.
Rules of optimisation:
1. Don't
2. (Experts Only) Don't Yet!
In any event, the point is not that puts() is faster than cout but that Bjarne Stroustrup says that cout is how to write to standard output and that it's not slower or takes up more space than C-code.
//do stuff
OK. puts is faster. But I hate to break it to you, compared to cout, puts sucks.
puts is error prone in a way that cout is not. More appropriately, cin is far, far superior to get and all those derivatives. cin, cout and cerr, are slower, have more overheads, take more space,etc, etc. I still prefer them. Why? Because they're safer. Not totally safe, but leauges safer than the equivilent c functions.
On top of that you can overload cin. Some people do screw this up, but being able to write:
while(cin >> Big_Complicated_Object){
}
Is very sweet. C can only offer me this with hacks that will freeze thy young blodd etc, etc, etc.
I don't find C++ too bad. The compilers are OK, and I don't abuse the language features. I'm an OO kind of guy, and I like decomposing my programs. C++ lets me do this in a way C cannot.
Back to the original idea, though. Chucking it in the sea is only a good idea if it really gets mixed and thoroughly dispersed. But it can be done.
To be honest, this sounds like an even more stupid idea than the "chuck it into the magma" plan proposed earlier. Sediment does not just hang about on the bottom of the sea. It gets dispersed, consumed by animal and plant life, and generally finds its way back up to the surface somehow.
Dumping nuclear waste in a fluid of any kind seems ridiculous. By this argument, we should be able to burn nuclear waste in incinerators and disperse it into the air.
Drums, for all their problems, at least do not lead to instant dispersal.
Continuing to use extreme and ill-fitting examples isn't really helping your credibility.
Chernobyl isn't an ill fitting example. It's the perfect example of how scientific arrogance, combined with human fallability, leads to extreme screw ups.
I've read up on pebble bed reactors. It's a good system. But I'm not going to accept for one second that it's an infallable system. Because people made it, and people aren't perfect.
There's been a lot of good press for the nuclear industry lately, obviously fueled by the rising cost of oil. Consequently, you get guys like this AC, who were probably anti-nuclear until they actually read about pebble bed reactors, and are now rabidly pro nuclear, and basically runs around calling anyone who disagrees an ignorent luddite.
I've actually taken the time to read into this "new" technology, even though it's actually been around for ages. there are good systems out there, but to go around like this AC saying that a pebble bed reactor is completely flawless is obviously a fallacy.
I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that every nuclear accident that ever was, happenned not because of the design of the reactor, rather, it was down to human error. People screw up, it's a universal fact. Unfortunately, with something as dangerous as nuclear energy, screw up can, and have had, big consequences.
Those old soviet reactors can and did function safely. Some still do. The only real flaw in their design was its complete underestimation of the ability of man and machine, in unison, to completely screw up. Any system that makes that same underestimation, is doomed to fall to those same screw ups.
I can only hope to the gods that people like that AC are not involved in designing these new pebble bed reactors, or any other reactors types, including fusion, that may come after. People who believe in their own infallability usually make the biggest scew ups of all.
OK I'll bite, due in large part to the fact that I read the entire article, including the critisisms section. I've also read other articles in wikipedia. Articles you clearly have not.
Let's take a look at the first critisism, which has clearly been edited by someone like yourself.
So we're all safe right? The gas is inert. It's cool right? Wrong. So potentially wrong.
Let's talk graphite shall we? Do you know what graphite is. Turns out, it's simply carbon. Here's a lesson from chemistry class. C + O2 -> C02. Turns out carbon burns in air. But does graphite? After all diamonds are carbon too.
As it turn out, yes graphite does burn in air. The substance is actually usually quite inflammable. However, one it starts to burn, it is almost impossible to extiinguish. This was the primary cause of the Windscale Fire, as it turns out.
So, let's imagine that air slips in as the reactor is too hot and the graphite moderator in the core ignited. Shit, meet fan.
Graphite burns. Shit, there goes the reaction moderator. Oops. What's that you say? The temperature is now over 1100 degrees centigrade. Darn! That's the melting point of uranium. Looks like the balls, already disinegrating, will now all flow into a big puddle at the bottom of the reactor. Reaching... critcal mass? Will there be an explosion now? I'm not nuclear physisist, but this all seems so potentially..... unsafe....
But this could never, ever happen to these new, expertly crafted pillars of human achievment known as pebble bed reactors right? Never ever, not even once over their 60+ years of service will a single atom of oxygen slip unnoticed past the level ten force fields surrounding the main chamber. The graphite in the balls will also never deteriorate under intense radioactivty levels. Never, couldn't happen. Nuh uh.
Now just accept that you were wrong and move on with your life.
Wow. You're right. How could I ever have been so foolish as to contemplate human and machine fallability. I should have much more blind faith. Like yourself.
Moreover, most of these problems could be solved by using computers to control some of the things that traditionally done by operators
You must be new here!
Pebble Bed systems are physically incapable of meltdown or explosion.
Let x = amount nuclear material is present in the reactor?
If x > (critical mass required for meltdown) then the reactor is capable of a meltdown, however unlikely that may be.
Is x > critical mass?
My Babies!!!
*OMF rushes its mutant offspring away from what was previously a sweet and alluring fireside, panics throwing water over the blaze, in the process causing the fire to spit, which it turn ignites are carpet fire setting the entire house ablaze and killing all the occupants, except for one of the mutant offspring who developed a resistance to heat due to grotesquely thick skin*
Announcer: "In conclusion, using nuclear energy could have saved these innocent freaks of nature. It is clear that in order to save our country and the world, we must give massive tax incentives to the nuclear industry"
A guided drop would cause a penetration of about 100 feet or so into silt, then it goes down a few more feet each year (mostly due to sediment buildup).
This seems a little extreme, especially considering that enriched uranium waste becomes only as radioactive as natural uranium in only 100 years. Which is a fraction of the time it takes for material to sink into the mantle.
Touche. But car deaths directly kill over 40,000 people in the US every year, (Source) and the ancient city of Chernobyl, unlike cities beset with coal smoke, is still a writeoff.
Coal which is 3 parts per million Uranium.
It's not so bad when you consider that soil on average contains 1.8 parts per million of Uranium. Source.
Also of note here, is that with coal and soil, we are talking about natural Uranium, not enriched uranium used in plants, which can take 100 years to return to natural radioactivity levels.
Why don't you go read about Pebble Bed reactors and try to understand the basic principles before you get all hysterical about it?
No, you don't, and that's exactlty the problem. You don't understand the technology so why do you think you can understand the failure modes?
I read about them. Coolant contamination appears to be the single biggest risk. If oxygen(air) leaks into the main chamber, the graphite moderator could ignite. I'm not sure how much the sudden ignition of graphite would upset the pristine interior of this paragon of engineering precision, but I imagine problems not strictly on the designers mind might occur.
A nuclear reactor is a living, breathing engineering entity. Things go right every day. Sometimes things go wrong. In short, if you belive a pebble bed reactor cannot meltdown, I have a bridge to sell you.
No, you don't. You are like the majority of people who think they know it all about nuclear. You don't know the worst case scenario, you just imagine you do. Go educate yourself, perhaps.
I think I'm fairly well educated on what the worst case scenario actually is.
...With their Hummer H2s! ...And humidifiers! ...And national reserves! ...And McPackaging! ...And the War in Iraq! ...And with your danm TV shows! *shakes fist*